Legend:

I have also been experiencing shutdown issues lately. It's on a new machine, so I can't be certain it started with 4.2. I'm using Debian 6.0.6 with kernel 2.6.32-5-amd64 as the host. I have two logs to attach.

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The first is from an ACPI shutdown of a group of guests (error-during-acpi-shutdown-of-group-VBox.log). The shutdown was done via the GUI, but the guests were all running in headless mode. I had to manually kill the VBoxHeadless process. When I killed the process I got a lot of errors in the GUI. Unfortunately I didn't think to screenshot them, but I'm guessing I had to click through 6-12 dialogs before it quit complaining.

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The second is from a scripted shutdown (error-after-terminated-VBox.log). The guest was shutdown via ACPI. While waiting for shutdown, the script queries for vminfo every second to check if the state has changed to poweroff. The script ran successfully the previous two nights and nothing changed on the host in between.

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I can't seem to get any consistency, but I've seen enough errors now that I'm starting to think it has to do with querying for vminfo while VMState is being changed. I think the following error is from such a case, but it's just a guess since I can't reproduce it.

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Edit: I have to apologize. I think I may have gotten my logs mixed up. I think the first log I have attached to this ticket is from a similar situation to the second, but while I was issuing commands manually. It was accompanied by the following error on the console.

For me, VBoxManage showvminfo returns an error often enough when I'm shutting down VMs that I can't rely on it in scripts without adding some retry logic. Is that normal?

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The second is from a scripted shutdown (error-after-terminated-VBox.log). The guest was shutdown via ACPI. While waiting for shutdown, the script queries for vminfo every second to check if the state has changed to poweroff. The script ran successfully the previous two nights and nothing changed on the host in between.

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I don't think I kept logs from an error I believe was similar to this ticket. I descibe it [https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=52848 in the forum]. When I manually killed the VBoxHeadless process that was hanging, I got several errors in the GUI (6-12 dialogs). Unfortunately, I didn't think to screenshot them.

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I can't seem to get any consistency, but I've seen enough errors now that I'm starting to think it has to do with querying for vminfo while VMState is being changed.